THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 12

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• Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

WALKING in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under  
    the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr Dimmesdale reached  
    the spot, where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through  
    her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold,  
    black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven  
    long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits  
    who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony  
    of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

   

It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled  
    the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude  
    which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained  
    her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would  
    have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline  
    of a human shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town  
    was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might  
    stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in  
    the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would  
    creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and  
    clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant  
    audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see him,  
    save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet,  
    wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was  
    it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his  
    soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept,  
    while fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither  
    by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose  
    own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably  
    drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other  
    impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor,miserable man! what right had  
    infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the  
    iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if  
    it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for  
    a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most  
    sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one  
    thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable  
    knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

   

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation,  
    Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if  
    the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right  
    over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there  
    had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without  
    any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked  
    aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten  
    back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in  
    the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and  
    terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it  
    to and fro.

   

"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his     FACE="Arial"> hands. "The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me  
    here!"

   

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater  
    power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The  
    town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the  
    cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches;  
    whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the  
    settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the  
    air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered  
    his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows of  
    Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line  
    of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate himself,  
    with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a long  
    white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked  
    unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him.  
    At another window of the same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress  
    Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which, even thus  
    far off, revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face.  
    She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.  
    Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard  
    Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous  
    echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and  
    night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions into  
    the forest.

   

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady quickly  
    extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among  
    the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The magistrate,  
    after a wary observation of the darkness- into which, nevertheless,  
    he could see but little farther than he might into a mill-stone-  
    retired from the window.

   

The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon greeted  
    by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off, was  
    approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here a  
    post, and there a garden-fence, and here a latticed windowpane, and  
    there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here, again, an arched  
    door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.  
    The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars,  
    even while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was  
    stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that  
    the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him, in a few moments  
    more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light grew nearer,  
    he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman-  
    or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well  
    as highly valued friend- the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr. Dimmesdale  
    now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying  
    man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the  
    death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven  
    within that very hour. And now, surrounded, like the saint-like personages  
    of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid  
    this gloomy night of sin- as if the departed Governor had left him  
    an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the  
    distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to  
    see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates- now, in short, good  
    Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted  
    lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits  
    to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled- nay, almost laughed at them- and  
    then wondered if he were going mad.

   

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling  
    his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern  
    before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain  
    himself from speaking.

   

"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I     FACE="Arial"> pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"

   

Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant, he  
    believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered  
    only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued  
    to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway  
    before his feet, and never once turning his head toward the guilty  
    platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite  
    away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over  
    him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety;  
    although his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself  
    by a kind of lurid playfulness.

   

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole  
    in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing  
    stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted  
    whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.  
    Morning would break, and find him there. The neighbourhood would  
    begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim  
    twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place  
    of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go,  
    knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost-  
    as he needs must think it- of some defunct transgressor. A dusky  
    tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then- the morning  
    light still waxing stronger- old patriarchs would rise up in great  
    haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing  
    to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages,  
    who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their  
    heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare  
    in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly  
    forth, with his King James ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins,  
    with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking  
    sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her  
    night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the night  
    at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out  
    of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would  
    come the elders and deacons of Mr Dimmesdale's church, and the young  
    virgins who so idolised their minister, and had made a shrine for  
    him in their white bosoms; which now, by-the-bye, in their hurry and  
    confusion, they would scantily have given themselves time to cover with  
    their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their  
    thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages  
    around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red  
    eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,  
    half frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where  
    Hester Prynne had stood!

   

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,  
    unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal  
    of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy,  
    childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart- but he knew  
    not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute- he recognised  
    the tones of little Pearl.

   

"Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then,     FACE="Arial"> suppressing his voice- "Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you  
    there?"

   

"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise;     FACE="Arial"> and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk,     FACE="Arial"> along which she had been passing. "It is I, and my little  
    Pearl."

   

"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. "What sent you     FACE="Arial"> hither?"

   

　

   

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne-     
    "at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his     
    measure for a robe, and am now going homeward to my     
    dwelling."

   
   

"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Reverend     FACE="Arial"> Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not     
    with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three     
    together!"

   
   

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding     
    little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other     
    hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed     
    a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like     
    a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as     
    if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to     
    his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.

   
   

"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.

   
   

"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

   
   

"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"     FACE="Arial"> inquired Pearl.

   
   

"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with the     FACE="Arial"> new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had     FACE="Arial"> so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he     FACE="Arial"> was already trembling at the conjunction in which- with a strange     
    joy, nevertheless- he now found himself. "Not so, my child.     
    I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day,     
    but not to-morrow."

   
   

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister     
    held it fast.

   
   

"A moment longer, my child!" said he.

   
   

"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and mother's     FACE="Arial"> hand, to-morrow noontide?"

   
   

"Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time."

   
   

"And what other time?" persisted the child.

   
   

"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister- and, strangely     
    enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the     
    truth impelled him to answer the child so. "Then, and there, before     
    the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together.     
    But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!"

   
   

Pearl laughed again.

   
   

But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and     
    wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those     
    meteors which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to     
    waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance,     
    that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt     
    the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of     
    an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the     
    distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always     
    imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden     
    houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the     
    door-steps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them;     
    the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track,     
    little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green     
    on either side all- were visible, but with a singularity of aspect     
    that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things     
    of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood     
    the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with     
    the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself     
    a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood     
    in the noon of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were     
    the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall     
    unite all who belong to one another.

   
   

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she glanced     
    upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression     
    frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's,     
    and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands     
    over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

   
   

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric     
    appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred     FACE="Arial"> with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so     
    many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing     
    spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in     
    the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was     
    known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We     
    doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell     
    New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of     
    which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some     
    spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by     
    multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the     
    faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the     
    coloured, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and     
    shaped it more distinctly in his afterthought. It was, indeed, a majestic     
    idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these     
    awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might     
    not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom     
    upon. The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening     
    that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship     
    of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when     
    an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone,     
    on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be     
    the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered     
    morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain,     
    had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the     
    firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's     
    history and fate!

   
   

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart,     
    that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the     
    appearance of an immense letter- the letter A- marked out in lines of     
    dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point,     
    burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as     
    his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness,     
    that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

   
   

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale's     
    psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed     
    upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that     
    little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth,     
    who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The minister     
    appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned the     
    miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other objects, the meteoric     
    light imparted a new expression; or it might well be that the physician     
    was not careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence     
    with which he looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor     
    kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness     
    that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of     
    judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for     
    the arch-fiend, standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his     
    own. So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's perception     
    of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness,     
    after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street     
    and all things else were at once annihilated.

   
   

"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with     FACE="Arial"> terror. "I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him,     
    Hester!"

   
   

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

   
   

"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister     FACE="Arial"> again. "Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I     
    have a nameless horror of the man!"

   
   

"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"

   
   

"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close     FACE="Arial"> to her lips. "Quickly!- and as low as thou canst whisper."

   
   

Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human     
    language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing     
    themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved     
    any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it     
    was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but     
    increase the bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then     
    laughed aloud.

   
   

"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.

   
   

"Thou wast not bold!- thou wast not true!" answered the child. "Thou     FACE="Arial"> wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow     FACE="Arial"> noontide!"

   
   

"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to the     FACE="Arial"> foot of the platform. "Pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you?     
    Well, well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our     
    books, have need to be straitly looked after! We dream in our     
    waking moments, and walk in our sleep. Come, good sir, and my     
    dear friend, I pray you, let me lead you home!"

   
   

"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister fearfully.

   
   

"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I knew     FACE="Arial"> nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at     
    the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my     
    poor skill might to give him ease. He going home to a better     
    world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this strange     
    light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you, reverend sir; else     
    you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see     
    now, how they trouble the brain- these books!- these books! You     
    should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime; or these     
    night-whimseys will grow upon you."

   
   

"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.

   
   

With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an ugly     
    dream, be yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.

   
   

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which     
    was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete     
    with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips.     
    Souls, it is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth     
    by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish     
    a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter.     
    But, as he came down the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton     
    met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognised     
    as his own.

   
   

"It was found," said the sexton, "this morning, on the scaffold     FACE="Arial"> where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there,     
    I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence.     
    But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is.     
    A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!"

   
   

"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister gravely, but startled     FACE="Arial"> at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost     FACE="Arial"> brought himself to look at the events of the past night as     FACE="Arial"> visionary. "Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"

   
   

"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs     
    handle him without gloves, henceforward," remarked the old sexton,     FACE="Arial"> grimly smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the portent that     
    was seen last night?- a great red letter in the sky- the letter     
    A, which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good     
    Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was     
    doubtless held fit that there should be some notice     
    thereof!"

   
   

"No," answered the minister, "I had not heard of it."   
   

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1. Ebooks list page : 86
2. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 2
3. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 11
4. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 10
5. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 7
6. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 8
7. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 5
8. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 9
9. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 20
10. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 6
11. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 4
12. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 23
13. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 3
14. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 1
15. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 14
16. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 16